Tuesday, August 25, 2015

My Dad

Colin Stewart Lindsay Keay

02/02/1930 to 25/08/2015

Dad died peacefully on Tuesday morning (25th August) with my
sister Andra holding his hand and mum and I nearby at St Andrews War Memorial
hospital in Brisbane. When he died he was listening to Vivaldi and Beethoven's
9th Symphony. Dad had been on palliative care since the previous Friday and had
been calm and comfortable. His last few days were spent with family around him,
listening to his favourite composers, and blissfully free of most of the
Parkinsons' tremors.

Colin was born on 2nd February, 1930, in Timaru, South
Island, New Zealand, the elder of two sons to William and Ruby Keay. His
brother Alister was born three years later.
Dad was dux of Papanui High School in 1947 and a founding member of the
Canterbury Astronomical Society. He received his BSc and MSc from the
University of New Zealand (Canterbury) and joined Clifton Ellyett's Radar Meteor
Astronomy group.

His mettle was sorely tested as a young child, spending time
in an orphanage and boarding away from home due to his mother's poor health and
then fighting off tuberculosis during his undergraduate studies. He spent
almost two years in Cashmere Sanitorium and endured two major operations in
1956-57 to remove part of both lungs.
The scars on his back looked like a singlet, but it was hard to notice
any reduction in his lung capacity for the energy and drive he brought to his
life and work.

Dad married Mum in 1958 in Christchurch. He was awarded his
PhD in Physics in Meteor Astronomy at the University of Canterbury in 1964 and
was also awarded the Michaelis Gold Medal in Astronomy from the University of
Otago. He also received an MA in
Astronomy from University of Toronto in 1965 and near the end of his career was
distinguished with a DSc from University of Canterbury in 1997.

Mum and Dad moved to Australia in 1965 for Colin to take up
a senior lecturer position in Physics at The University of Newcastle, NSW,
where he worked until his "retirement" in 1993. Both Mum and Dad kept so busy in retirement
some of us wondered how they ever found time to work!

There were a number of firsts in Dad's long career. He
created a new branch of science called geophysical electrophonics, "the
production of audible noises of various kinds through direct conversion by
transduction of very low frequency electromagnetic energy generated by a number
of geophysical phenomena". Within 24 hours of the launching of the first
satellite (the Russian Sputnik in 1957) Dad was the first to calculate that it
would be visible over NZ. This led to Dad and Dick Anderson publishing the
first two papers on observing a satellite. He also published the first papers
on high resolution infra-red maps of Jupiter and was President of Commission 22
of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and inaugural chairman of the IAU
working group on the prevention of interplanetary pollution (space junk). In
1997 Minor Planet 5007 was named after Dad in recognition of his services to
astronomy.

As a pioneering science communicator, as well as numerous
public talks, Dad wrote monthly newspaper columns, first for the Christchurch
Press and then for The Newcastle Morning Herald where his Sky and Space notes
were regularly published for more than 30 years. As a press correspondent he
covered some of the launches of NASA's space missions.

Away from science Dad was active in the community being the
founding president of the Hunter Skeptics (1987), President of the Newcastle
Cycleways Movement (always lobbying for more bikeways), founding president of
the Newcastle Astronomical Society (1993) and a member of University of
Newcastle council representing staff, amongst many other notable activities.

But what did Dad mean to me? A friend of mine decribed
losing a parent as like a ship losing its anchor. Even in your 40s you can fall back on the
knowledge that if all fails you can always move back in with your parents and
then, one day, that's not true. Certainly, as someone resistant to growing up
as I am, this is very confronting.

Dad loved seeing and understanding the world. As he got older
he took pleasure in simple things, a walk around the block with the dog,
watching a sunset, identifying the planes passing overhead.

When I was young
Mum tells me that I woke up needing a bottle at least once a night until I was
two years old. Apparently Dad used to get up and give me a bottle and then go
back to bed and wake up the next morning having no recollection of ever having
gotten up. At night Dad would often read me books (his favourite was Richard
Scary) and give me back rubs so I could go to sleep. He would reassure me that
there were no spiders in my bed while also refusing to remove the huntsman
spiders that frequented our house on the basis that they were not harmful. He
was less tolerant with the funnel web spiders that visited and would kill them
with scientific precision (and a brick).

He would take me to the baths - the Lambton swimming pool,
where he taught me how to dive. He would jump off the towers and was happy to
be ignored while I played with friends, which was just as well because he
insisted on wearing leopard print swim trunks, foam thongs, a towelling bucket
cap and an orange and brown animal print towelling robe.

His crimes against fashion were many and varied and he
pursued those crimes with relentless determination, every day matching a
Singaporean dragon shirt with a Maori tiki bolo tie, long shorts in various
shades of brown or khaki and teamed off with cream socks and brown leather
sandals. His eyebrows were long, white and shaggy. As my best friend Vicki used to remark,
"he looks like Julius Sumner Miller” (the scientist on the cadbury ads -
"a glass a half of full cream milk in every block"). I think he
enjoyed looking like a scientist, the group he most identified with.

Dad got out his telescope to show all my school friends the Halley’s comet when it went past. He was always pointing out the constellations in the night
sky and we would often have satellite spotting competitions (my record - 9 in
one night). Dad had a knack of appearing at the same time as a satellite, claiming first sighting and then disappearing back inside before reappearing to claim another sighting. It took us a while to discern that he was calculating the time and position of each satellite pass over. I had my revenge however. Dad enjoyed the odd glass of wine and considered himself a reasonable connoisseur. He was quite proud when I would join him with observations about the wine paired for dinner, without realising I was acquiring all my information from the description on the back label of each bottle. I could have kept that harmless deception going for years.

Dad loved travel and visited many cities while mum always made
an effort to make sure we kids got there too. As well as travel Dad loved
hosting visitors from other countries, assuring mum that "it was no extra
work". It was not uncommon for us to have someone from Russia living with
us for 6 months at a time, the house always seemed full and was seldom dull as
I was growing up and I learned to appreciate other cultures.

One of my favourite memories of dad was our time visiting
his parents at Sumner in New Zealand. We would walk together in the early
evening after dinner along the shore at Sumner, climbing Cave Rock, walking
through the cave at Cave Rock, in the years that the cave was accessible, and
walking down to the red cliffs of Scarborough.
As anyone who knows Dad can attest this was never a relaxing evening stroll
though, more of a power walk. Visits to New Zealand were always a special time
I remember driving to Akaroa - ancestoral home to the Curry family, special
lunches at The Sign of the Takahe on Cashmere Hill and visiting Vern Shadbolt’s deer farm at French Farm on Banks
peninsula.

For much of his life Dad was a creature of habit. While his
schedule may have changed in later years I can recite what it was in the
mornings when I lived at home:

6:30am out of bed

7:00am listen to news on radio while reading the newspaper
and enjoying a cup of white tea (no sugar). For breakfast he would eat two
weetbix topped with hot water and full cream milk and with a sprinkling of
brown sugar (pre-mixed with raw sugar), then finishing off with two pieces of
wholemeal toast spread with margarine, one slice topped with creamed honey and
the other slice with red jam.

He would always read the Newcastle Morning Herald where for
more than 30 years he published a monthly column on astronomy describing what
people could see in the night sky until the 1990s when a new editor of the
Newcastle Morning Herald decided to ditch Dad’s astronomy column for an
astrology column. He never read that paper again.

Dad loved science and never lost his inquistive mind. He
could be irascible and hard to live with but he was my dad and I believe his
greatest achievement was instilling a sense of questioning in all those he
influenced paired with wonder for the world around us and all the beauty it
holds.

Colin Keay DSc FRASNZ FAAAS FInstP FASA, Husband to Myra,
Brother to Alister, Father to Andra, Lindsay and Sue, Father-in-law to Michael
and Mark, Grandfather to Ilyan, Rob, Miranda, Zoe, Sarah and Sammy. He will be
greatly missed but what an amazing 85 years it was.

A man of great respect, always ready at our meetings of the Newcastle Astronomical Society to answer curly questions and have a story of his own experience.He is the first Honorary Life Member of that NAS, (and there is not yet a second !)George Barnes (past President of NAS)